La traducción al español de las palabras funcionales en Romance de los Tres Reinos

Function words convey few concrete lexical meanings. However, they are of unquestionable importance in expression in almost all verbal languages (Chen, 2006), as they serve as a grammatical connective between words with full meanings. In Classical Chinese language, they are no exception. The vacuum in lexical meaning, in addition to the obscurity in diverse functions, makes it difficult to translate a language unit in Classical Chinese with words of this kind. This article, with specialized corpus and statistical analysis, explores the possibility and, if so, ways to translate the function words most frequently used in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Segments or sentences with such function words that are difficult to translate are selected as typical examples. Relevant analysis is conducted based on Peter Newmark's theory of semantic translation and communicative translation. As a result, a Chinese-Spanish version of the function words studied is presented, a glossary that is convinced to be interesting for scholars in the field of the bilingual translation.